1971 A descent module released by the Soviet spacecraft Mars 2 becomes the first man-made object to reach the surface of Mars, albeit by crashing

2001 The Hubble Space Telescope detects a hydrogen atmosphere around the planet Osiris, orbiting a sun-like star 150 lightyears away in the constellation Pegasus, the first time the atmospheric composition of an extrasolar planet has been determined

1701 Birth of the astronomer Anders Celsius, after whom the temperature scale is named

1925 Birth of John Maddox, the science writer who edited Nature for 22 years

28 November

1950 Birth of Russell Alan Hulse, who shared the 1993 Nobel Prize with his doctoral supervisor Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr. for their discovery of a new type of pulsar